she has a point though...
In the real world no software is fully free.... go talk to red hat or novell. Maybe they will give you the os for free, but if you need support they will pull money from each and every orifice in your body..... and they will require you to smile and say things like 'thank you' and 'i am not worthy' when they do it too.
And if you need any kind of decent application that can run on it ... prepare to be ransacked for more money.... novell or oracle db anyone ? tools from cadence and mentor anyone ? solidworks ? SAP ? . fill in your own serious business or cad appliaction...
free .... the cost of the hardware/os is NOTHING compared to support costs and cost of applications. 1000$ gets you a good workstation ( quad core + quadro gfx + os of choice ) these days. 99 $ for a wintendo licence is nothing compared to that. And the total system cost is nothing compared to licences that run in the millions every year for the applications.
Plus if there is a major update to your linux you run the risk that half your hardware no longer works because they DELIBERATELY break the api.... i call it sabotage.
And 'free' in the other sense ... whenever you touch something that has open source in it you have to pay a bloody bunch of bloody lawyers to cover your behind. You might just have created something that may fall under GPL or LGPL and you may have to give out the keys to the kingdom... you need a lawyer to translate the legalese. Otherwise you may feel the wrath of the fsf ... I'll take commercial compilers. Those come with a licence to sell whatever i produce with them and the freedom to include whatever libraries come with a licence. ( and yes i have the source to those libraries and can make derivates. )
Its only free for hobbyists. they can install distros to their hearts content.
Yes i play with linux too. Here is my history
- version 0.89 on a 720k floppy was soo cool. look a *nix command prompt...
- the first port of x-server. look man, i have x-eyes on my screen... all you have is win3.1 with a ton of applications
- look i have a cool LAMP based on 6.xx of ubunut. Until an automated update broke the whole config to the point it wuld not boot, and i had to find a way to access the reiserfs volume from a windows pc....
I still have a linux machine. To browse the big bad web. There it shines.
Something to think about : if all people in the world were honest , we would not need virusscanners and spyware removers and we wouldn't need linux or windows ( we'd long time ago had something that works. )
coat please. i have to go boot iRMX now.